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Aloha and Welcome to this chapter on Legendary Surfer Francis Preston "Pete" Peterson!

Pete was the U.S. Mainland’s contest champion of the 1930s, winning the Pacific Coast Surfing Championships (PCSC) – the major U.S. surfing contest of the period – four times out of ten; in 1932, 1936, 1938 and 1941.

No other surfer came close to his dominance of Southern California waves throughout all of the 1930s and it was not until three decades later that a single surfer racked up as many major contest wins within a similar span of time. Yet, Peterson’s greatness as a surfer was not based so much on his skill as a surfer or contest champion, it was because he was THEE quintessential waterman...

1930s: Pete Peterson 5

In 1948, Pete married a second time, but this second marriage – like the first – was not long in duration.[1] By the early 1950s, stories about Pete Peterson had shifted from surfing, shaping, lifeguarding and water safety to boating and tales of the open water.

On a day off, Monday, July 7, 1952, Pete took his 28-foot sports fisher Mike out to Santa BarbaraIsland for some White Sea bass fishing. Mike was a fast, deep V-bottom hull that Pete had set-up for charter – diving and fishing, mostly, as surfing the Channel Islands would not become popular until nearly two decades later. Along with him on the trip were his nephew, Santa Monica lifeguard Mark Peterson, Jr., 21; Ed Campbell, 32; Eddie Booth, and Ernie Henderson, both 17.[2]

The trip was fine until they headed back in very early morning, around 3:00 a.m., Tuesday morning. That was when they ran into a fog bank about fourteen miles offshore. Craig Lockwood wrote about what happened next, when the boat hit something:

“At the wheel, Pete feels the impact and reflexively cuts the engines. Water’s surging up through the cabin floorboards.

“‘I had to look in the bilge,’ he explained some years later to Peter Dixon, “and there was our bait tank sitting atop the hatch.’” The bait tank had been set aft against the transom.

“To get at the hatch requires moving the 500-pound bait tank. ‘It’s funny what you can do when your life depends on it. Anyway, my partner and I grabbed that tank and had it over the side in seconds.’

“Peering below into the bilge with a flashlight, Pete sees the water gushing in through a three-foot crack just to the left of the keel.

“To paraphrase Pete, what a quick-thinking man can do in a life-threatening emergency may defy reason. Most people wouldn’t think of knocking a hole in the bottom of a sinking boat to let the water out.

“Peterson does.

“Realizing instantly that stanching the flow into Mike’s hull was impossible, he grabs a hatchet, dropping to his knees in Mike’s stern.

“‘Well, this was a pretty fast boat so I knocked a hole about six inches in the transom.’

“He sprints back to the throttles, jamming them forward. With the tach redlining, Mike sluggishly lurches forward.

“(I) took off for Santa Monica, right through the fog, by gosh. I had to go fast so the water would run out. Else we’d have foundered in about three minutes.’

“Realizing he has to get the bow up higher, Pete yells at the crew to get aft. With their weight transferred, Mike’s bow lifts and the powerful 200-horsepower engine responds…”[3]

“They were 12 or 14 miles offshore in the dark,” told Pete’s daughter Lisa. “Dad knew that if Mike went down they probably didn’t have a chance, so my dad took a good look at the sky and his compass and headed right toward Santa Monica.”[4]

“Ed Campbell, a former airman, had survived an 18-day ordeal of being adrift in a life raft during the war. His level of apprehension begins rising.

“‘Pete didn’t have a working radio aboard Mike, and honestly, I was listening to every rev that engine made, hoping it was going to make it.’

“‘Just past dawn they sight the outline of Santa Monica Pier,’ Lisa recounts. ‘But nobody was up and moving around. So Dad zoomed in with a big sweeping pass and beeped Mike’s horn.’

“No response. Pete makes another inches-close pass. Seventeen-year-old Edward Booth jumps onto the lower deck’s landing and rushes up to find the hoist operator while Pete circles. Roused, the operator runs onto the pier and lowers the hoist’s sling deeply into the water.

Tragedy struck only three weeks later, on Sunday afternoon, July 27, 1952, when Pete’s friend Wesley Wiggins was returning home from a charter in his 33-foot Spare Time.[6]

Even though Wiggins was a safety conscious skipper and a skilled seaman – always double-checking and logging course changes – accidents can happen to anyone. After seeing to it that his thirteen passengers were comfortable, were enjoying themselves, and had various fishing grounds and kelp beds to draw plenty of catch-able fish from, Wiggins experienced a dramatic turn of events on the trip back home that afternoon.

With Santa Monica’s skyline in view, two of his passengers were cooking on the galley’s two-burner butane stove when suddenly the cabin exploded, killing the deckhand and one passenger instantly. Everyone else was blown overboard. Worse yet, the bait and fish they had had on board quickly attracted sharks. Deciding the best thing he could do was get help, Wiggins told everyone that he was going to swim in to get help. He was never seen again. Throughout the remainder of the daylight hours, the floundered passengers saw several boats, but were not able to get their attention. Thus the stage was set for a horror-filled night.[7]

“Lieutenant Peterson is on duty that night,” wrote Craig Lockwood. “He knows Wiggins, knows Spare Time, and knows that when boats don’t show up it’s usually engine trouble. Procedure was to wait three hours and then inform the Coast Guard, which he does at 23:02 hrs. And a C.G. radio Urgent Bulletin is posted at 0055 hrs.

“Los AngelesCounty lifeguard boats have joined the search, but the radio call comes in that a light fog is hampering their efforts…

“His watch over, Pete waits for dawn and heads out on his own with his son, John, in Mike.

“‘I owed Wes that favor, since Wes had towed me back from Port Hueneme several weeks before.’”[8]

“At 14 miles out,” Craig Lockwood continued, “Pete spots wreckage. ‘Little chunks of wood… the (back) of a skipper’s chair. As soon as I saw that, I knew the boat had blown up. I turned and ran upwind and updrift until I found more wreckage… spread over a wide area with tooth marks on it, but no people. On the other hand, there were plenty of sharks. Big blues. Active, and more than I’d ever seen out there.’

“Taking a fix on his portable RDF, he notes where the triangulated beams cross, and heads back. Alerting all the available local boat operators, he gives them the course, alerts the sheriff’s five plane Aero Squadron, grabs a pal, Ray Heath, and heads out again…

“Spotting the wreckage, Pete runs five-minute grids, and at 0930, spots the first survivors.

“‘I almost missed them, but Ray spotted them.’ With the two survivors aboard, he heads east and finds a third clinging to a long, flat board. ‘He really gave me hell for not getting there quicker.’

“Hoping to find more survivors he presses on. “I picked up a lot of empty life jackets with teeth marks of sharks all over them, but I didn’t find any more people. The jackets were still tied, and we could tell by looking at them that their owners had been eaten right out of them. Wesley Wiggins had looped his belt through part of his. That’s all we found of him; his belt and the jacket.’”[9]

Later, parts of bodies with lifejackets were also found. Pete’s friend Peter Dixon summed-up Pete’s role in the rescue of those who remained: “One man who knew what he was doing accomplished more than the combined air and water hunt of dozens of aircraft and hundreds of boats. That’s the kind of canny and quiet determination typical of Pete.”[10]

Over the years, Pete got interested in photography. In a direct line from Tom Blake to Doc Ball, Pete produced several prototype camera housings for his own use and experimentation. His most notable experiment was “an underwater housing that George Downing mounted on his board and on his back like a butt pack,” wrote Craig Lockwood, based on what Pete’s son John told him. “Shot at Makaha in the mid-1950s, these may be the first-ever shots of a board taking off underwater.”[11]

In the mid-1950s, some friends of Pete’s – “Two farmers from Oxnard” is how Frank Lyons and Jack Ecoff described themselves – hired Pete to film an in-air travelogue of Baja California using a Cessna single-engine airplane.[12]Baja California by Air covered “Twenty-five hundred miles, at 15 miles a gallon – no flat tires,” according to its narrator. “In following the beaches, bearing east and south, we usually fly low so we don’t miss anything… There’s always a beautiful landing strip.”[13]

In 1955, Pete resigned from the Santa Monica Lifeguard Service and married a third time; this time to Alice, who had worked in Esther Williams films. Their daughter Lisa was born in 1958 and this third marriage of Pete’s was the charm and a lasting one.[14]

Even as late as 1960, at age 47, Preston “Pete” Peterson was referred to as, “probably the smartest and most capable underwater and open sea sportsman in the Pacific today.”[15] A waterman in his free time and professionally, Pete was a diver of high repute and, after his lifeguard days were over, shifted into deepwater salvage in order to make a living.[16] “If you ever needed a job done,” one contemporary said, “you called Pete. Once Pete set his mind to something he did it, no matter how tough it was.”[17]

Dick Jappe, a lifelong friend of Pete’s, noted that his friend “cast a long shadow, but left little ego-wake.”[18] “Pete’s modesty was one of his most obvious traits. He never tooted his own horn. Never made any claims. He did everything well but never bragged about anything.”[19]

All along, he kept up his craftsmanship.

Pete continued to manufacture lifesaving equipment, paddleboards, surf dories, work in the motion picture industry, run his marine salvage business with his son John, and even maintain his championship in tandem surfing through most all of the decade. “Often times,” Craig Stecyk wrote, “people forget about Pete Peterson’s steady output of ocean vehicles and lifeguard rescue equipment. His racing paddle boards, soft rescue tubes, revolutionary all-fiberglass boards and foam/plywood/balsa sandwich surfboards were all noteworthy achievements.”[20] Included in this list was his innovative salvage boat Nordica, 51-feet long and powered by twin Caterpillar diesel engines.[21]

Pete’s daughter Lisa especially remembers the early-morning coffee stops at the old Porthole Café on Santa Monica Pier. “People greeted him warmly, respectfully, and Pete was always polite in return. He was an ongoing source of information.”[22]

Family was important to Pete, but as a father he was strict. “He liked to be in control of his environment,” recalled Lisa, mentioning how Pete would make sure the kids did not bring sand into the car after being at the beach and also about his punctuality. “Time, tide, and Pete wait for no one.”[23]

Many of the early California surfers tandem surfed at one time or another. After all, it was a great way to meet and get to know girls, and it was also included as an event at most surf contests. Pete grew to be a master of tandem surfing – so much so that he and his various partners over the years won tandem contests well into the mid 1960s.

“Peterson didn’t surf competitively in the ‘50s,” documented Matt Warshaw in the Encyclopedia of Surfing, “then returned with spectacular results in the early and mid-’60s as a tandem rider. With various partners (including Patti Carey, Sharon Barker, and Barrie Algaw), he won the 1960 and 1962 West Coast Championships, the 1964 and 1966 United States Surfing Championships, the 1966 Makaha International, and the 1966 World Championships.”[24]

Pete had helped foster tandem surfing on the U.S. Mainland, along with Whitey Harrison and other coast haoles of the 1930s who were first exposed to it at Waikiki. The first record we have of tandem surfing leaving Hawaiian waters was when Duke Kahanamoku gave swimming and surfing demonstrations near Sydney, Australia, 1914-15. During one of his most noted surfing demonstrations, he tandem surfed with Australian Isobel Latham at FreshwaterBeach.[25] It would take nearly two decades later for tandem surfing to appear off the coast of the U.S. Mainland.

Tandem surfing is not easy. “Trick tandem riding,” explained Otto Patterson in Surf-Riding, Its Thrills and Techniques, “requires the surfer to ride a wave with a wahine either on his shoulders or in any of a great number of acrobatic poses, all performed while his board slices across a steep wave.”[26]

“The act requires a particular combination of partners in order to be successful,” underscored Jason Borte in 2001. “… the man clearly is the captain of the tandem ship, plotting and navigating the course while hoisting his trophy mate skyward. He must be a competent surfer of considerable strength, while his dainty companion generally tips the scales in double digits. In most cases, a competitive duo includes a girl with either a dancing or an acrobatic background familiar with flaunting her body.”[27]

“He had Popeye forearms,” Les Williams recalled of Pete, after first meeting him in 1946 when Les was still a teenager. “They were bigger than most men’s biceps. That’s how he could lift those girls at that age. He was winning tandem events in his late fifties, at Makaha. In ten-foot surf!”[29]

Life magazine ran two photos of Pete and Barrie Algaw winning the 1966 World’s tandem event. “Every gremmie on the beach knows that surfing is a sport mainly for teenagers, but this in no way inhibited Peterson, the nearly bald 53-year-old businessman from Santa Monica who specialized in tandem surfing.” Life went on to note that Pete, at 6’2” and 200 pounds was “bigger than most competitors” and that over the past few years he had outlasted “more partners than [dancing legend] Fred Astaire.”[30]

By the time Pete finished competing in water sports, he had racked up a stunning record of wins, most notably in paddling. “Paddleboard racing was then closely allied to both lifeguarding and surfing,” noted surf writer Matt Warshaw. “… the waterman ethic was, and largely remains, a combination of the three – and Peterson was a masterful paddler. He was described in Los Angeles-area newspaper articles as a ‘paddleboard and aquatic star,’ and ‘the bronzed paddle star of Santa Monica,’ and from the early ‘30s until the late ‘40s he consistently set and reset paddling marks in all categories, from 100-yard sprints to 26-mile open-ocean marathons. In a 1939 meet he was victorious in the 100 (his 30.7-second time beat a nine-year mark set by Sam Kahanamoku, Duke’s brother), the 880, the one-mile, and the relay. Arlene [his first wife] won the women’s 100- and 440-yard sprints.”[31]

California’s best surfers competed in the Pacific Coast Surfing Championships eight times between 1928 and 1941, until World War II.[32] The annual event was dominated for 4-out-of-9 years by Pete. He reigned as California’s officially recognized top surfer during 1932, 1936, 1938 and 1941, but throughout the entire decade most everyone considered him the best surfer, contest winner or not.[33]

One of Pete’s most respected records was one that was informal and not part of any organized program. He beat both Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabb during in and out buoy swims in front of the Santa Monica Lifeguard Headquarters. Johnny Weissmuller was an Olympic gold medal swimmer and was known to millions of moviegoers as Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fictional character. Buster Crabb was also an Olympic gold medal swimmer and played both the cinematic characters of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.[46]

Pete was inducted into the International Surfing magazine Hall of Fame in 1966.[47]

Once, Surfer’s Journal founder Steve Pezman asked LeRoy Grannis about a rumor that 1930s-era surfer Tulie Clark may have beaten Pete in a race at one time. LeRoy’s response, while not completely accurate, reflected the attitude most all 1930s surfers felt about Pete: “I don’t remember anyone ever beating Pete.”[48]

Pete was on O‘ahu when the big storm of 1983 hit The Islands in March that year. Whether he had a premonition or a feeling the storm could do as much damage or more once it hit the West Coast – we’ll never know. We do know that he left Hawai‘i after only a few days after arrival. Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, “just hours later the storm meets him,” his son John recalled, “and devastates the pier, and his shop.”[49] Four hundred feet of the pier was torn out by the storm.[50]

Pete’s shop on the Santa Monica Pier had been there in one form or another for over a half century, with priceless photographs, records, documents, specialized tools and a career’s worth of other material goods. Several of Pete’s famous tandem, surf and racing paddleboards had been there on the pier, too, stored in the lifeguard station at pier’s end. Most all were lost.[51]

One of the few survivors was “Big Red,” a red racing paddleboard that Peterson built for and with Dave Rochlen in 1947. Rochlen had gone on to win the Diamond Head paddleboard race in 1951 with Big Red. “Decades later,” wrote Craig Stecyk, “David’s son Pua used the same board in another victorious effort in the Outrigger Canoe Club sponsored event.”[53]

The loss of his shop must have been devastating to Pete, but by all accounts from friends and family, he chose to just carry on. “Let things slip,” Craig Lockwood remembered Pete once saying, “and sometimes they’ll take you along with them.”[54]

After a busy Sunday two months after the storm, Pete docked the Nordica in its berth at Marina del Rey. After a shower, while wrapped in his towel, he laid down on a berth in the ship’s cabin. It was there that he passed on, May 4, 1983.[55]

1930s: Pete Peterson 4

World War II and the 1940s

Pete kept shaping and selling surfboards, “which he sold shaped for the price of thirty-five dollars,” recalled Don James. “Units sanded and coated with five coats of Val Spar Marine Varnish went for a few dollars more… Pete liked to drop his girl off at the tile factory in Malibu and then surf the break all day. At five o’clock he would paddle back in and chauffeur his lovely girlfriend back home.”[1]

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Pete initially got a deferment due to the fact he was married by then and had a young son (John, four years old in 1940) and worked in public safety. Pete’s marriage to his first wife Arlene did not go well and in the middle of the rocky marriage, he was inducted into the U.S. Navy, on February 18, 1943.[2]

By June, Pete had passed all his training in San Diego, testing well due to the fact he was already an accomplished waterman. Because of his lifeguard lieutenant experience and being skilled at handling small craft, Pete was sent to New Orleans to qualify as a Ship Fitter, with the non-commissioned rank of Petty Officer Third and Second Class.[3]

Pete completed the New Orleans training and took a two-week leave to visit his son in Santa Monica. Cap Watkins reinstated him at the beach for five days so he could earn a little extra money. In a significant generational hand-off, Pete took young Matt Kivlin with him to ride Malibu for Pete’s last surf session before going back on duty with the Navy.[4] This may have been Kivlin’s first taste of Malibu, the break whose style master he would become.

Pete went back to train in New Orleans and earned his Petty Officer First and Chief. By November 1944, he had completed both the Navy’s demanding Diving School, its Firefighter’s School and Velocity Power Tool School, going on to qualify as a Diver Second Class.[5]

Pete again had a short leave back in Santa Monica where he lifeguarded for a few days and then shipped out on the U.S.S. Pandemus bound for the Philippine Islands. By March 1944, the U.S. Navy was operating out of Olongapo in Subic Bay in the liberated Philippines. Pete was stationed here as well as on board, anchored off the islands of Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His skills were in high demand and his crew of fitters and divers worked around the clock, often times right next to other crews removing dead bodies from the areas to be worked on. If the repairs were successful, the ships are put back in action. If not, they were sent back to Subic for further fixing. Pete was responsible for heavy repair work, often working underwater, also helping to remove bodies, welding in hard-hat diving gear under conditions so difficult that he would never talk about them afterwards. “My dad never spoke of the war,” attested his son John, “even about his service.”[6]

After the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 15, 1945, bringing an end to the war, since Germany had already been defeated earlier in the year. Even though the war was now over on all fronts, it took Pete a while to get back home.

On the way back, at one of the islands the U.S.S. Pandemus visited, Pete bartered for an outrigger canoe that he was allowed to keep on the fore deck of the ship’s cargo hatch. In his off-watch hours, when other crewmen relaxed in their bunks smoking, reading or playing cards, Pete would lower the outrigger overboard and sail around the various lagoons, diving and trading odds and ends to villagers in exchange for breadfruit and coconuts.[7]

It took the U.S.S. Pandemus seven months to finally return to its homeport of New Orleans. Pete was discharged with $142.01 separation pay, of which $99.65 went to bus fare to get back to Santa Monica. Fortunately, his old job as Lifeguard Lieutenant on the beaches of Santa Monica was still waiting for him. Finding housing was a different story. With thousands of G.I.’s returning home before him, local housing was nearly nonexistent.[8]

Cap Watkins again came to the rescue. He offered the use of one of Santa Monica’s rescue boats so that Pete would not only have a place to stay, but also bring his son John under his wing again. John, then eight years old, had been staying with family friends since 1943. Now, father and son reunited in a new home, albeit small. They had tiny berths in the rescue boat’s cabin, a tiny galley and showers at the lifeguard headquarters.[9]

Even though gasoline was no longer rationed, automobiles, like housing, were hard to get. No matter, Pete was still able to score a clean 1941 Plymouth coupe and it didn’t take father and son long to use it to hit favorite surf spots and rekindle friendships amongst those who were lucky enough to make it through the war alive. When Pete got together again with Whitey Harrison, his surfing shifted more to the south, with San Onofre being a focal point. It was not long before Pete was surfing San Onofre with Whitey and his group on a regular basis on weekends when Pete and John could overnight.[10]

Pete eventually found a small house for himself and his son. It looked like their lives and those of their friends were getting back to normal, despite the intense disruption of the Second World War. Yet, there was no returning to the good old days of the 1930s. They had been lean years and ones where people often had to make do with what they had, but they were pristine years for surfing. The post-war period was markedly different than the pre-World War II era. The Depression was a thing of the past and its passing was understandably regretted by no one. But something of high intangible value was lost as the productivity of the war continued unabated. The United States became not only the leading country on the planet, but also its richest. In California, this prosperity was clearly in evidence by the state’s population explosion and sprouting of buildings and highways everywhere. The spirit of the 1930s was replaced by a more materialistic culture that rode on the crest of this unprecedented period of prosperity.

World War II had not only bread American prosperity, but introduced many new technological advances. One new wartime technology that would have a great impact on water sports was the development of “plastics” – specifically fiberglass, phenols, mono and polyester resins that had begun during the war and had already significantly aided the war effort. Pete found himself on the inside track of the use of these materials in the repair and making of surfboards due to his friendship with engineer Brant Goldsworthy.

“One small Southern California company owned by an acquaintance of Peterson’s, Brant Goldsworthy,” wrote Peterson biographer Craig Lockwood, “had been a wartime aircraft parts sub contractor.

Goldsworthy had developed a practical working knowledge about resins and fiberglass application and had been in touch with the marketing departments of chemical firms such as Owens-Corning, who had patented ‘Fiberglas’ (one ‘s’) in 1936, and Dupont’s chemical engineer Carleton Ellis, who had patented the first polyester resin the same year.”

All over the country, large corporations, like Owens-Corning and Dupont, were converting their industrial facilities from wartime production into civilian. Market research indicated to Owens-Corning and Dupont that fiberglass and resin would sell the best to the building industry, commercial aviation, and the small boat industry.[11]

“Brant Goldsworthy is certainly the ‘godfather of fiberglass’ in the world,” attested Hobie Alter who, in the late 1950s, became the key man in the development of the polyurethane foam surfboard for mass production. “He is looked at as the ‘godfather’ of reinforced plastics.”[12] Goldsworthy and his partner Ted Thal would, a little later on, become the first ones to sell fiberglass and resin for surfboard construction.

Tom Blake protégé, champion paddler and legendary lifeguard Tommy Zahn said of the Brant Goldsworthy/Pete Peterson connection that Pete and Goldsworthy were more than just acquaintances. “Pete had been a lifetime friend of Brant Goldsworthy’s.”[13]

Pete recognized the potential for lighter boards using fiberglass. Before the war, he had made balsa boards to that end. These had to be coated with varnish to keep them from getting water-logged. Varnish, however, while flexible and organic, succumbs to ultra violet rays, breaking down in sunlight and lacks tensile strength.[14] Not so with fiberglass and this is how Pete’s famous “Plastic Board” came about:

Working with Goldsworthy, Pete used a release coat on an existing paddleboard, laying up two halves in a clamshell configuration. They pulled the two parts off and used these to create a female mold. The subsequent male molds were then bonded to an inch-and-a-half redwood stringer, sanded and glass taped to seal the joint.[15] According to Nat Young, the seam was sealed with fiberglass tape.[16] The result was the first hollow fiberglass paddleboard. Hollow board creator Tom Blake was so impressed he soon drew up board plans for “all fiberglass construction” of his own designs.[17]

Pete’s first fiberglassed board was constructed in June of 1946. Brant Goldsworthy helped and Joe Quigg ‑ along with Pete ‑ tested it out in the water.[18]

“Pete had two boards,” at the time he made his fiberglass paddleboard, recalled Tommy Zahn. “One was ‘The Pete Board’ and the other was this [prototype of the hollow fiberglass] board, which was redwood/balsa… It was just balsa wood with redwood rails. It wasn’t ‘The Pete Board’ ‑ which was balsa with a redwood deck. And this prototype, which was wood, was the one he used in big waves. He didn’t use ‘The Pete Board’ in big waves.

“And so, when the fiberglass first came out, he thought, ‘hey, it would be a real neat idea to reinforce the nose of all these boards with fiberglass’ and [he] started doing that. Then he covered the whole [prototype] board with fiberglass. Then, he said, Brant talked him into making an all-fiberglass board. So he used it [the redwood/balsa big wave board] for a male mold and pulled that – this board [the ‘plastic’] off that one; then, put a center dividing strip of redwood, here, and nailed it on and glassed over that. Then, the whole board was effectively fiberglass except for this dividing strip – you could see light through the whole board.”[19]

It is possible that the first fiberglass paddle or surfboard could have an even earlier start date. Twentieth Century surfing innovator Tom Blake told his biographer Gary Lynch that “Before the war [World War II] started… [noted swimmer Jim Handy] had sent a board back East and had it fiberglassed… that’s what Tom swears. I’ve asked him three times about it, cuz everyone says it couldn’t be true. But, he said that before World War II, Jamison Handy already had a fiberglass board. I don’t know why he’d tell me that if it wasn’t true.”[20]

Early surfboard shapers who used fiberglass – guys like Hobie Alter ‑ tend to dismiss this East Coast connection, maintaining that fiberglass was developed on the West Coast for the war effort. Sending a board back to the East Coast to have it fiberglassed would not have made any sense.[21] However, it is true that the Whitmans, in Florida, were early on into fiberglass. It is possible that they got a hold of some before the war, after it and resin were invented in 1936.

Irrespective of Pete Peterson being the first verified surfer to fiberglass a board, this innovation went virtually unknown among surfers of the day. Even Hobie Alter admitted, “I always thought [Bob] Simmons was the first guy to use fiberglass on a surfboard.”[22] Anyway, Pete did not produce further fiberglass boards in any number that would have been noticed.